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Corpus-based Research in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honor of Doug Biber
Edited by Viviana Cortes and Eniko Csomay
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 66] 2015
► pp. 25–48

Telephone interactions

A multidimensional comparison

This chapter presents the functional features of linguistic dimensions from three telephone-based interactions: (1) customer service transactions (Call Center corpus), (2) telephone conversations between friends and family members (Call Home corpus), and (3) spontaneous telephone exchanges between participants discussing topics identified by fixed prompts (Switchboard corpus). These three telephone-based corpora are then compared with data from face-to-face English conversation (American English Conversation corpus). Linguistic comparisons across these registers followed a corpus-based, multidimensional analytical approach developed by Biber (1988) using established dimensions of customer service talk from Friginal (2008). Results suggest that variation in these spoken interactions is largely influenced by the nature of conversational tasks and the use of the telephone as a medium in communicating ideas, opinions, or instructions. Keywords: Multidimensional analysis; spoken corpora; telephone interactions

Published online: 14 January 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.66.02fri
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Friginal, Eric, Lucy Pickering & Carrie Bruce
2016. Narrative and Informational Dimensions of AAC Discourse in the Workplace. In Talking at Work, ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
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Pickering, Lucy, Laura Di Ferrante, Carrie Bruce, Eric Friginal, Pamela Pearson & Julie Bouchard
2019. An introduction to the ANAWC. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:2 ► pp. 229 ff. DOI logo

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